Japanese multinational cosmetic giant founded in Tokyo, Shiseido Company, boasts an extensive portfolio of owned brands and subsidiaries in skincare, makeup, body care, hair care, and fragrance. For Shiseido Company China, keeping track of brand equity and managing brand presence across various social and media channels is essential. Focusing on digital touchpoints, Shiseido Company wanted us to develop a new tool that could help evaluate and improve the performance of specific brands.

The goal was to evaluate clients' brand presence and content quality for Shiseido, Clé de Peau Beauté, EFFECTIM, and Aupres across WeChat, Tmall, Douyin, 小红书, and other channels and compare it to main competitors Lancôme, LaMer, Yaman and L'Oréal Paris respectively.

The project includes creating the 'Digital Brand Health' framework, defining scoring mechanics that quantify qualitative data, and developing a digital visualization and recommendation tool. DBH aims to determine the current state of digital brand comms, evaluate performance, and highlight and implement necessary improvements. Regular DBH assessment will help Shiseido stay one step ahead of the competition and improve ROI and media spending.

Right off the bat, we saw three core challenges ahead: 1. How might we aggregate the data and collect brand(s) comms? 2. How might we quantify the qualitative data into a proprietary weighted score? 3. How might we present gathered insights and recommend relevant improvements for each brand's unique business goals?

First, we had to understand each brand's unique value proposition, target audience, category differentiation, distinct brand assets, and local market specifics. Similarly, each brand has specific business goals (increase awareness, boost reputation, drive conversion, or deepen engagement). Not only did we need to understand our brands in detail, but also competitors to do a proper performance gap analysis.

An additional obstacle in assessing Chinese channels is their sophisticated audience segmentation; making a general channel assessment is often impossible as each customer can only see content tailored to a social CRM profile. So non-buyers, new followers, and loyal customers of various demographics, behaviors, and psychographics would all get different tailored content.

The DBH framework and scoring we designed has three main pillars:

Foundation – we audit brand X's presentation, its distinct look & feel, brand assets leverage, channel diversity, and evidential strategy. We identify how brand presence reflects each brand's stated positioning and business goals. And we do a comparative assessment vs. brand Y, even based on available resources.

Content – we evaluate brand content and its effectiveness according to specific brand priorities. It includes overall content quality, design, and messaging and introduces touchpoint performance metrics such as brand distinctiveness, product seeding, and platform nativeness.

Outcomes – we provide a precise score and recommendation to improve each channel's presence and content based on the gap analysis. It is possible to add analytics data per content/channel, exponentially improving the DBH tool's value.

We base DBH scores on an interdisciplinary expert panel we assemble. Three teams of creatives, planners, and consumers are covering distinct brand presence, channel strategy, and consumer relevance, providing objective analysis and recommendations.

Creative experts analyze the use of different brand assets, visual consistency, messaging and communicated themes. Planning experts evaluate the use of channels, content-channel match, and ecosystem strategy according to industry best practices. Finally, we bring real customers to hear their perception of brand touchpoints and track how effective brands are at being relevant, appealing, and engaging, delivering upon their promise.

The resulting DBH offers a simple score to track one's brand performance over time vs competition. And the DBH tool allows brand managers and department heads to double-click into each aspect of their brand's digital performance and get detailed scores and recommendations for any specific touchpoint (for example, 'brand:shiseido' > 'channel:weibo' > 'content:pgc' > 'campaign:X' > 'score:product seeding').

The DBH digital product is now used by the Shiseido Company China, allowing them to be more considerate and mindful about their marketing spending, channel, and content strategies. The competitor benchmark and score results will enable us to track the gap and, if needed, close it or differentiate.

The tool is an excellent addition to brands and their partner agencies, keeping track of their brand presence and continuously improving it. DBH is not designed as industry-specific and applies to any client vertical within the Chinese ecosystem.

We can see two promising future directions to extend DBH framework. First, it would be interesting to include western social media and e-commerce channels (which would require adjustments in each channel assessment logic). And second, adding real-time data via various platform APIs to increase the data-informed aspect makes DBH tool useful too that brands can include into their martech stack.